The Bravest Speak
Firemen on the flag-raising statue that’s raising racial ire.

January 16, 2002 8:25 a.m.

t's Tuesday morning in a New York firehouse, and about 10 firemen are gathered around a table in the back room drinking coffee. It's been four months since they lost a number of their colleagues from this firehouse in the September 11 disaster, and remembrances of the dead — flowers, cards, yellowing newspaper articles — hang on the wall. A visitor stops by and asks the men if they would be willing to talk about the racial controversy over the statue commissioned by Fire Department of New York brass, and which will soon be installed at Fire Department headquarters.

"As long as you don't give the name of our company or any of our names," says one. "Look, we just got rid of one of the most vindictive fire commissioners [Thomas Von Essen, who was widely disliked by the FDNY rank and file] we ever had, a guy who thought nothing of moving guys around or punishing him just because he didn't like what they had to say. And not only did he take it out on the people, he would take it out on their sons when they got on the job."

One of the firemen explains that the guys, all of whom are white, don't want to be pilloried as racists for their opposition to the statue. The 19-foot bronze image is based on the famous newspaper photograph of three firemen raising Old Glory over the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center. Those firemen happened to be white. The FDNY leadership approved a change in the statue, which will now depict a white man, a black man, and a Hispanic man, in the interest of diversity.

OK, fine, the visitor says. You won't be ratted out. Now, fellows, what do you think about the statue?

"As far as taking a scene from history, that shouldn't be altered," says one fireman. "You'll get this from every firehouse. Everybody feels the same way."

"That's right. [The FDNY leadership] made a race issue out of it, where before there was nothing like that. If they had just built the statue the way it was, nobody would have said anything," says another. "Those firemen [in the photograph] didn't even want recognition. Just seeing their faces was probably enough for them. Then they turned around and said, 'Guess what, we're going to use you on the monument, but your face isn't going to be there, all because of political correctness."

A third fireman chimes in. "If they wanted to make this kind of monument, they could've taken the Twin Towers, and could've had the people lined up around it, all the emergency workers, all the ethnic groups in that monument, sort of like what they did with the Vietnam Memorial Monument down in Washington, DC. With this, they took an actual picture of what happened and changed the ethnic background just out of political correctness. You know what, that's wrong.

"Is the Iwo Jima memorial next? Is Mount Rushmore next? Will we have to have another face on Mount Rushmore to satisfy the ethnic minorities in this country? Are they going to have to take Thomas Jefferson off Mount Rushmore because he owned slaves?" he continues. "That's not the way history goes. First of all, it's not going to help race relations. If anything, it's going to ignite more resentment against other people. It's definitely done that in the white community. Enough is enough. When is it going to stop?"

Aren't most New York's firemen Irish or Italian?

"It's not a matter of Irish or Italian," says a fireman. "If there were three black firemen raising that flag, and they took a picture of that, then so be it. But that's not what happened. You happened to have three firemen together who raised the flag, and now they're changing it. Don't do that with one of our events. Pick up your own statue. Make your own design. What are you going to make it from an actual picture for? Otherwise, go do it to Iwo Jima next. I'm sure the Marines would be happy to have that done to their monument."

Did they ask any of the rank-and-file firemen for their opinions before altering the statue?

"They did this without any input from any of us," says a fireman. "I didn't even know about this until they decided to unveil it the other day. They've already spent over $180,000 on this, and then all of a sudden here it is, and they ask 'What do you think about it?' Personally, not too much."

The men begin talking about Lawrence Guyot, a black activist who appeared on Fox News's Hannity & Colmes last week to defend the alteration of the statue. Guyot didn't win any converts here to his point of view.

"I think activists should mind their own business. They have no business in the Fire Department, making a race issue out of it," says one man, angrily.

"What business does that guy have on TV, spewing venom?" says another.

The men say that most of them have worked their entire careers with minority firemen, and say they've never had a moment's problem. One points out that a number of the firemen from this firehouse who died on September 11 were minorities.

One of the dead, says a fireman, "was one of the best firefighters you'll ever meet. You got guys from here still working down there on their own time to find him. This has nothing to do with not being able to work with black guys."

"See," interjects someone, "the guys who died that day didn't die as white men or black men or Hispanic men. They died as firemen."

One fireman asserts that the FDNY leadership "tainted" the issue "by injecting race into the controversy." Now, they feel, objecting to what they see as the falsification of history to serve socially desirable ends leaves them open to being thought racist.

The New York fire department, it must be said, is overwhelmingly white. These firemen say that you can't force minorities to apply for the job, and that it would be morally wrong — and possibly dangerous to the public — to alter the entrance requirements for the sake of creating a more diverse workforce.

"Everything these days always has to be [racially] perfect, by the numbers," they say. "Well, the department's 86 percent white. Well, that's civil service!" says one fireman.

Another, sitting at the table, says, "When I applied for this job, I wanted it so bad. I trained for it. I worked out every day. I busted my butt to get this job. I took the courses. Anybody could do that if they wanted to. Anybody can take the civil-service exam."

The statue is scheduled to go up outside FDNY headquarters in Brooklyn sometime this spring — unless an anti-statue petition drive started among the FDNY late Tuesday by Brooklyn-based fireman Steve Cassidy succeeds. But the surviving ranks of the fire department, perhaps, will shun the monument erected in tribute to their 343 dead colleagues.

"I'm not going by that phony memorial. I refuse," says a fireman. "It's incendiary. You are inciting more racial hatred by doing this. You might make satisfy some people, like the Al Sharptons and the Jesse Jacksons. But it doesn't do anything for the silent majority. The silent majority in this country doesn't do much, but they do speak in other ways. Eventually, it's going to come to a head if you keep doing this all the time."

As he spoke, an alarm went off inside the firehouse, and half the men rushed to their truck. In a flash, they were off, responding to an emergency not as white men, but as firemen.